


til death, or tony stark, do us part

by purplefennels7



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Chaos, I Believe in Jasper Sitwell, Jasper Sitwell is Not Hydra, M/M, Snark, a silly thing i wrote because eliza made me sad, cameo by Phil Coulson, good old 2012-style tower fic, hints of hill/may for kicks, it's what we need in these trying times
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-09
Updated: 2020-05-09
Packaged: 2021-03-02 05:41:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,185
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23590081
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/purplefennels7/pseuds/purplefennels7
Summary: The Avengers find out Director Fury is married. It goes about as well as you would expect. It doesn't get much better once they find out to whom.
Relationships: Nick Fury/Jasper Sitwell
Kudos: 12





	til death, or tony stark, do us part

**Author's Note:**

> hey quarantine friends welcome back to the year of our lord two thousand and twelve this is nickjasper Vintage Style.  
> dedicated to and induced by eliza @alexeishostakoff i hope it lives up to the dms

The Avengers find out that Director Fury is married on a Thursday. Tony doesn't stop screaming until Friday. 

"This was your own fault," Bruce tells him, munching at the poptart he’s nicked from Thor’s stash as Tony waves a half-full coffee mug around. "You could've just not gone snooping through the Director's personal files."

"I didn't expect him to be married, maybe then I wouldn't have!" Tony wails, slumping across his workbench. A mess of wrenches and bolts goes skidding across the floor, Dum-E in hot pursuit. "Seriously, my brain cells will never recover."

"I'm sorry for your loss," Bruce says, as seriously as he can, and makes his escape before Tony can stop him.

"Gutted, Bruce, absolutely gutted. JARVIS, can we order some brain bleach?" comes through the workshop doors as they slide shut. Bruce shakes his head, hoping that Tony might have the good sense to let it go before the next time him and Fury have to be in the same room.

He isn’t holding out much hope.

The thing about Avengers Tower having been Stark Tower in its past life is that when Tony knows something, the rest of the tower knows it too, and rapidly. By the time Bruce returns to the kitchen from his ill-advised foray into the workshop, the rest of the team has migrated into the general vicinity and is engaged in furious speculation. Bruce sidles along the back wall until he fetches up next to Steve, who’s hovering by the fridge looking mildly conflicted.

“How long have they been at this?” he asks quietly. Steve shakes his head.

“Twenty minutes already.” Across the kitchen table, Clint winces and grabs at his leg, suggesting that Natasha has just kicked him in the shins.

“Of course I _knew_ he was married, I just haven’t worked out yet to _who_ ,” she says, glaring at him as if he’s insulted her, which to be fair, he probably has. “Like you’ve never hacked into the personnel files, I know for a fact you have part of Coulson’s file on your hard drive, you security risk.”

“Yeah, but I couldn’t even get past the encryption on Fury’s,” Clint shoots back, seemingly unfazed by the fact that they’re discussing hacking into intelligence agency files on some of the scariest people Bruce has ever met. “How the hell did you?”

Natasha just winks, then rolls her eyes. “It’s not like it did me any good, it’s all redacted.”

“C’mon, Nat, you’ve gotta know something, if you got into the files.”

“Like I’d give up my secrets that easy.”

“This seems unwise,” Bruce mutters out of the side of his mouth. Steve shakes his head.

“Are you going to stop them? Anyway, I gotta say, I’m a little tempted to do a bit of poking myself - Fury just never seemed like the type of person to get married.” Bruce sighs. One thing that he’s learnt since moving in, on Tony’s relentless insistence, with the rest of his chaos-ridden teammates is that even though Steve is really good at projecting the law-abiding, morally upstanding Captain America image, he’s really just the world’s worst troll under the stars and stripes. 

He grabs an orange from the fridge behind him, looks around to see Thor waving, somewhat bemusedly, after Clint and Natasha as they vanish out the door, and wisely decides to beat a strategic retreat. He doesn’t particularly fancy being around when Director Fury finds out that his superhero team has been spending their working day snooping into his personal business.

\---

Nat, Clint decides, is a dirty rotten liar. She starts guessing as soon as he starts the engine of one of Tony’s cars and roars out of the garage towards SHIELD HQ. 

“It can’t be Maria, she’s a lesbian and last I heard, dating May. And Sharon’s too young, and also I don’t think Fury’s her type.” He glances over in surprise. 

“Since when is Hill dating May? Anyway, you’re just saying that about Sharon because _you_ want to date her.” The grin he gets in response is the one that feels like being smiled at by a particularly sharp set of knives, but he sees her leg twitch in the tell she’s never been able to get rid of.

“I’d assume since they went home together after cocktail night last week. Ask Jasper if you really want to know. I don’t want to wound your ego by suggesting Coulson, but-”

“Shut up.”

They spend the rest of the short drive over to HQ throwing suggestions back and forth, each one more outlandish than the rest - it actually was Hill for a mission and they forgot to get it annulled, it’s Stark and he pretended to freak out to throw them off the scent, the whole thing is fake and Fury doctored his files to throw everyone else off, it’s someone from outside SHIELD, it’s someone from the CIA, and so on. He takes a brief detour to the cafe a block down from the building to grab a half dozen of the donuts he knows Jasper likes, and a coffee that he swears isn’t for Phil (it is). By the time they’re parking in the underground garage and swiping their badges at security, they’ve gone through and rejected almost the entire organization, down to and including Accounting. 

“I actually have a briefing to go to, because I am a responsible agent,” Natasha says on their way up the stairs. 

“Oh, ‘responsible’ is what they’re calling it now?” he protests, shoving her. She shoves back, and they emerge into the hallway still knocking into each other. He smacks a friendly kiss onto her cheek before she jogs off down the hall, and looks both ways before unscrewing the vent cover near the floor and sliding into it, pulling the grating shut behind him. He makes his way up three levels to Phil’s office only to find it empty, but drops down out of the corner grating anyway to leave the cup of coffee neatly centered on his desk, stealing one of his pens to scribble a quick _Not a bomb!_ on a post-it note and stick it to the lid.

It takes a little longer to track Jasper down in the maze of hallways, and at least one of the donuts definitely gets squashed on the way, but Clint finally spots him coming out of one of the conference rooms on level four and waits until he’s directly next to the vent before dropping out of it.

“Barton,” Jasper says nonchalantly, like Clint hasn’t just fallen out of a ceiling vent. Clint scowls petulantly and falls into step beside him.

“One day I’ll get you with that, swear to god.” 

“I’m not a junior agent, Barton, I don’t jump and scream when my fellow agents appear next to me.” Clint just rolls his eyes and shoves the box of donuts at him.

“Is this a bribe? What do you want from me?” Jasper asks, narrowing his eyes, but immediately ruins the impression by flipping the box open and selecting a donut.

“Can’t I bring my good friend food without being suspected of ulterior motives?” Jasper waves his half-eaten donut dismissively.

“I know for a fact you’ve never said the phrase ‘ulterior motives’ in your life, so, no. I’ll ask again: what brings you into my illustrious presence today?”

“Illustrious, my ass,” Clint can’t help but grumble.

“Hey, you want my help or not? At least, I’m assuming you’re here for my help. And you’re getting lunch with me, as payback.”

“Okay, fine. Is Hill really dating Melinda May? I think Nat’s messing with me.” Clint’s never figured out how Jasper manages to radiate _please get this ancient gossip out of my face before I die_ without even changing his expression, but fuck does it work.

“Ooookay, I’ll take that as a _maybe_. Here, I bet you haven’t heard this one. Did you know Fury’s married?” They’ve made it to the canteen by this point, so even though Clint sees Jasper make some sort of aborted motion that could be surprise, it’s probably just him reacting to today’s meatloaf. His face remains inscrutable as always.

“You really have to stop listening to the junior agents gossip,” he says, with a blandness that rivals Phil at his best. Clint grins and nudges into Jasper as they head for one of the corner tables, where Jasper pulls out a paper bag from his briefcase and extricates a sandwich from it. 

“C’mon, Jas, have more faith in me. Anyway, I didn’t hear this one from the juniors. Tony’s been screaming about it since yesterday. I don’t think I want to know how _he_ found out, but yeah.” And _hell yeah,_ now he’s got his attention. 

“How’d Stark get wind of that?” Jasper asks, actually setting down his sandwich to squint at him. 

“So it _is_ true!” Clint crows victoriously. Jasper seems to realize his mistake a moment later, but the damage is done. “I can’t wait to tell Nat. Say, d’ya know who it might be?”

“I said nothing of the sort,” Jasper says archly, but he looks a little too interested when Clint starts lobbing guesses at him, pulling out a pen and starting to scribble down names on his paper bag, and there’s definitely going to be a betting pool by the end of the day. _Clint one, Jasper zero._

\---

“So,” Maria Hill says, taking a seat in one of the deliberately uncomfortable chairs in front of Fury’s desk. “Stark finally found out you have the capacity for love.”

“I can still fire you,” Fury says darkly, not even looking up from the form he’s filling out. “And whoever leaked that to him is taking a nice, long trip to the Russian highlands as soon as I find out who it was.”

“Stark won’t possibly guess,” she says, leaning back in her chair and putting her boots up on the corner of his desk. “He’s met Jasper, what, once? I don’t even want to think about who he might think it is.”

“Knowing Stark, actually, he’s already hacked into my file and found absolutely nothing.” A paperclip embeds itself into the toe of Maria’s boot, and she yanks it out and plops it back into the appropriate container, ignoring Fury’s glare.

“Well, you never know. I figured it out within a week of your first date.” She gets the eyebrow of judgement in reply.

“Coulson told you, you mean, and you told May, which I definitely should’ve sent all three of you somewhere worse for. Vladviostok was a fucking cakewalk.” 

“Your leniency is noted,” she says, swinging her legs off his desk before the projectiles get any sharper and getting to her feet. “I’ll give Agent May your best.” Fury’s _fucking finally!_ comes through the door as she pushes it shut.

She gets it, she really does. SHIELD doesn’t have frat regs, per se, but it’s an intelligence organization, and one with a hell of a hierarchy. There’s a point to be made that it’s an intelligence organization that runs on caffeine and gossip, sure, but everyone tries their hardest to keep rumours as rumours. It’s easier for everyone that way.

Still, though. She really wants to see Stark’s face when he finds out who, exactly, Fury is married _to._ Maybe, if she’s lucky, and asks Agent Romanoff really nicely, she’ll bring a camera.

\---

Bruce figures it out first, a few weeks after the initial revelation, on a perfectly normal weekday that contains nothing more exciting than mutant mushrooms overrunning Queens. They’ve all been forced into thirty-minute decontamination showers to get rid of the spores that they’ve tracked back in on their gear, although not before SHIELD’s scientists descend on them for samples. Bruce doesn’t mind it that much - certainly not as much as Tony, who’s still sulking about having to surrender his suit to the mercies of the cleaning team. The Hulk’s specific skillset had been deemed slightly overkill for the situation, and he’d sat out in the van with Agent Sitwell and the rest of SHIELD’s backup squad and only been exposed to the spores when the rest of the team had piled in. It’s been a long day, though, and by the time they’re truly into the debriefing, Tony seems to be deliberately winding Fury up under the guise of answering his questions.

At least he hasn’t brought up him being married yet, even though this is the first time since what Bruce has decided to call That Day that they’ve been in the same room. At this point, Bruce isn’t entirely sure how many of them would stop him if Fury decided to shoot him. 

But Bruce is a _scientist_ \- it’s amazing how often people forget that - and the one thing he does better than anything else is _observe._ And so he sees it, when Fury pulls out Sitwell’s chair for him at the start of the meeting. He sees that even though they’re trying to hide it by having identical cups of coffee, they’re both sipping from each other’s in between sentences. He sees it when Fury gets up to pace, seething at the fact that Clint’s report consists only of the single sentence ‘I shot what Sitwell told me to shoot,’ that they keep each other in their line of sight at all times.

They’re really not being very subtle at all, he thinks, hiding a smile. Tony is absolutely going to flip his shit when he finds out. 

\---

It takes two more weeks until they slip - slip is probably not the right word; more of a concerted reveal, most likely. They’re finishing up yet another debrief, this time with the whole contingent of SHIELD’s senior agents at the head of the table because their mission involved a disenchanted HYDRA cell with some decidedly illegal weaponry and even less morals than the originals, and the originals were already neo-Nazis. 

It all happens in the space of about a minute. Fury’s closing down the holoprojectors, snapping something about attempting not to level a square mile’s worth of German farmland in the process of completing their mission and he _is_ going to write them up for it this time, and as he turns Sitwell is there with their reports already in hand and a smirk on his face. 

“The Avengers levelling a compound to carry out a mission should be par for the course by now, sir,” he says, and then produces a second cup of coffee from god-knows-where, and something that could be a smile twitches at the edges of Fury’s mouth.

“Hey, wait, why don’t I get free coffee, we were the ones who did the work,” Tony says, stopping in his tracks where he’s attempting, badly, to sneak out of the room, and spinning around to peer accusingly at the agents. 

A look like he’s just solved a complicated problem crosses his face. His jaw doesn’t actually drop, but it comes pretty close.

“Wait a fucking minute.”

Bruce grins, and sits back to watch the show.

“ _You’re_ the one Fury’s married to?” Sitwell looks mildly offended, but glances over at Fury with a resigned look, and then they both pull matching rings out from under their collars.

Clint’s mouth falls open.

“Sitwell, you fucking _liar!”_ he shrieks, whirling around in his chair. “You little shit - you started a _betting pool!_ On your own _fucking marriage!”_

Sitwell nods, snickering. 

“Your face right now, Barton. Maria, you better be filming this.” Hill indeed has her phone out, hiding her own giggles behind her hand.

“Maria, you knew?” Natasha says, and even though she’s trying to hide her surprise, it’s clear she hadn’t known either. Maria nods, pointing at Coulson next to her. 

“To put credit where it’s due, he told me first.” 

“ _You_ knew??” The betrayed expression on Clint’s face is, indeed, priceless.

“He was Nick’s best man,” Sitwell shouts over the cacophony. 

“You told me you were on a mission!” Clint looks like he’s close to passing out. If his voice goes any higher, windows might start shattering.

“Well,” Coulson says, perfectly deadpan, “we did take out an AIM cell before the reception.”

“Only at your wedding, Jasper,” Natasha says, obviously having accepted that this is now normal, “would the reception involve a bit of light assassination. Also, you get a free pass on this one, but if you don’t invite me to your vows renewal or whatever, you’re dead to me.”

“Okay,” Tony says, slamming his hands down on the table. “Two of the most terrifying people I know, which has become a lot in the last year, are married to each other. Cool.” He walks out of the room, muttering to himself. 

“Meeting adjourned,” Fury yells after him.

“You’re _married,_ ” Tony shouts back, like that explains it. 

“I congratulate you on your union, Director, Agent Sitwell,” Thor booms, grinning. “We must celebrate this auspicious day. Perhaps with some of good Tony’s wine?”

Literally everyone around Bruce is a troll, and he should’ve seen it coming.

“Someone warn them about the mead,” Natasha hisses, before joining Clint in converging on Hill, Coulson, and Sitwell, where a whispered conversation involving a lot of hand-waving and _quite_ a lot of money changing hands is under way. 

“I couldn’t even get into the files the old-fashioned way,” Steve mutters. Bruce thinks it’s best not to ask what that old-fashioned way was. It probably involves criminal activity. “Did you know the whole time?” 

“Since that mission with the mushrooms. Honestly, I think they knew we were onto them the whole time.”

“I always did like you better than Stark,” Fury says suddenly from beside them. “You’ve actually got some sense.”

“Tony lacks subtlety, not sense. I just, see people, I suppose.” 

“A skill that not many people recognize.” 

Watching as Fury makes his way across the room to slot himself into a space at Sitwell’s side, natural as anything, Bruce thinks he understands. It’s sweet, really - and _that’s_ a word he never expected to associate with Fury - the way they orbit so effortlessly around each other, both exuding a sense of supreme contentment with the world with their rings shining proudly over their shirt collars. They probably aren’t allowed to do this often; to just _be_ , and be seen, in the unvarnished truth of what they are to one another, and if that’s what’s to come out of all this, then, well, it could’ve gone much worse. Even if Tony does spend all his time whining about how his hacked cameras just keep coincidentally catching them kissing in unoccupied conference rooms - well, that’s his own fault for hacking into them in the first place and leaving the code lying around on a public server. Any possible distributions of the locations of said cameras and which ones might be up on the workshop monitors at any one time cannot be attributed to anyone, and especially not Bruce, who at the time was enjoying a delightful cup of tea and a gossip with Jasper, and had no knowledge of such an event until it was already over.

**Author's Note:**

> maria sends that video to nat and it becomes her no. 1 used piece of blackmail for the rest of eternity. clint never lives it down.  
> i hope this was as fun for u to read as it was for me to write <333 comments + kudos + evidence that y'all like the boys always hold a special place in my heart.
> 
> on tumblr [@romanovnat](https://romanovnat.tumblr.com)


End file.
